wip

So, I saw a sweet little moment at the Medieval Faire in Forest Grove.

And I was like, “I’m gonna paint that all Norman Rockwell stylez.” Because I miss painting. It was fun. I super love using using my Instagram as a documentation of process.

But everything is the Loc-Nar, for me, so. The feeling sort of changed.

I do love how this turned out and I decided that since the original is just getting filed away somewhere I might as well make it available to get as a print at Society 6, if you are a creepy fuck who likes to spend money. Or a wonderful person. You could be a wonderful person who likes to spend money too.

I’m making myself pick just one thing to focus on a month. For Feburary it’s comics.

It’s not quite like riding a bike.

Mind you, it’s not like I haven’t drawn at all since I stopped really poking at comics. I sketch people on transit sometimes, and clothing ideas. Recently I did a (very) rough storyboard and realised that hey, that visual storytelling I devoted so much time to is rather useful.

But I am very glad that I thumb-nailed all this last year. Not that I’m following any of it that exactly—see, I made a significant change of something, I added in a car. A car that I am now going to have to draw on nearly every page. Cars are kind of a bitch to draw. So I cheated.

I mean, I love these little die cast cars and it’s not like I don’t already have several others. But several days of February had ticked over before I could get a chance to spend ten minutes at Freddy’s, sorting through a two yard square space packed with so many tiny cars that I kept knocking them off the little pegboard posts. But, I found the model I needed and it is now riding around in my bag with my sketchbook, so I can work on the train.

Which, guys. Please let us all hope that nobody on the train feels like harassing the crazy lady holding a 1/24th scale ’71 El Camino and frowning while she draws. I got a goodly number of pages pencilled today.

I hope I can keep it up, with this pace I may get a good chunk ‘inked’ even. I’m going to do the final linework and backgrounds on the computer, the style for this whole thing is loose, so who knows. It’s nice, playing at this after so long. My skills are not up to par, maybe, but the stress of caring about it is gone. My pencils are looser and I’m not worrying so much. It’s just a thing I do! Other people do it better, but this thing is just one aspect of what I do so it is fine. It’s nice.

I think I’ve finally settled into the six main colours I want to use in stitching. There are spaces for paint swatches, when I unpack the paints. I used my basic lettering alphabet and my favourite dozen-plus stitches, which are mostly chain and buttonhole variants: